Sophia Hubs weekly entrepreneurs’ club with local business speaker

This week we welcome Amal Simothy who will share his experiences of setting up an accountancy practice with his wife in 2012. He will also share his tips for start-ups having seen the successes and mistakes of start-ups they have worked with. Amal and his wife run Accounting Preneur and have written an
electronic book of business tips

Our weekly entrepreneurs’ club provides practical support to start-up businesses and a community network in Redbridge.

It’s a network of local people with entrepreneurial ideas to learn, share and grow their enterprises together. We meet at different times of the week at the Redbridge Institute (our new base) or Enterprise Desk (Redbridge Central Library).

There’s monthly topics, a speaker, input from everyone, time to work on your businessand networking. All our speakers say the same thing – business is about relationships and your customers are people who know you and like you. Lots of deals take place here!

We believe in collaboration and strong community/business relationships. The speakers offer their input for free; they get satisfaction from helping out and the opportunity to increase their networks and potential customers. In the same way start-ups, small businesses and community groups give and take.

We are particularly keen to support social enterprise and more socially conscious business practices.

It’s a pilot for a new market in Ilford Town Centre. A winter street food market with local food traders and businesses. It’s the UK’s first halal street market. It’s an opportunity to try out and buy new food products not available elsewhere. It’s a new cultural event for Ilford!

Fresh, fabulous, varied and vegan/vegetarian or Halal. And friendly because it’s locals and start-ups that want to engage with their potential customers.🙂

Who is behind it?

Work Redbridge in collaboration with Vision Redbridge Culture & Leisure is working in partnership with Ilford BID and Peckish Catering to bring street food traders to Ilford

Redbridge and Vision RCL is part of their business support programme Enterprise Desk. Trading Post is a pop-up market stall that provides new businesses in Redbridge with the opportunity to test their idea or sell their product at a live event. The winter street food fair will see Trading Post run by four first time traders offering products from homemade sauces to Turkish street food . The participants have had support from Enterprise Desk with their business plans and preparing to trade, everything they need to help get them in front of customers. Peckish Catering, themselves an Enterprise Desk member (and Small Business 100 business) are running the established traders part of the event (five other street food traders).

The Christmas Ilford green pop up market with stalls, activities and a friendly community cafe. Just turn down Clements Road and there’ll be some flags out. Free stalls still available. Comment at end of this blog for more info – we’ll get back to you. This is run by Sophia Hubs and Ilford Recycles.

Start-up Jyoti Bhatt to share important tips at Sophia Hubs entrepreneurs’ club

Tuesday 6th December 6.30-8.30pm

Room C, Redbridge Institute, Gaysham Ave, Gants Hill IG2 6TD

We love giving start-ups an opportunity to promote their business and share their USP at the Entrepreneurs’ club and are looking forward to this session. It’s aimed at start-ups but this is an open invitation. Jyoti’s talk is not only aimed at businesses but also the owners and their personal finances.

I am going to share with you my 35 years experience in the informal setting of Sophia Hubs Entrepreneurs’ club. I am going to help you think about financial and wealth protection of your business and about making good and safe investments. I am pleased to have this opportunity to give back to the entrepreneurs’ club.

Guest blog by Tony Lotter of Organic Ilford, a Redbridge social enterprise

Christmas 2015. I was exhausted and fed up. Our little scheme was thriving but was being blighted by ongoing supplier issues and thefts at our Redbridge pick-ups. Replacing produce or refunding customers was costing us more than we could afford. As was hiring transport to collect and deliver produce. After spending hours in the cold (and growing dark) weighing and packing veg and hearing my one-year-old daughter calling for me over and over, I decided I’d had enough. I wanted to spend my time with my family, not with turnips or spreadsheets.

So I closed the scheme and took a year off. Everyone said I was mad. But I didn’t feel drained anymore. Volunteering is great to do but when you are locked into doing it because you feel obliged to or an organisation treats you like staff but can’t afford to pay you, well that’s when you start to resent it. And resentment damages both the individual and the company.

Time away allowed me to rethink the purpose of Organic Ilford. I missed the ultra-fresh, local, seasonal produce each week and I couldn’t find anything like what we’d supplied in the shops in Ilford, and the tiny variety of organic food that was available was so overpriced we couldn’t afford much of it. Then Brexit happened and although that might not seem like it has any relevance to a small-scale veg scheme, the implications of leaving the EU to our food supply are huge. UK farms rely on skilled (and cheap) European labour and for some of the year (known as ‘the hungry gap’) the UK has to import food as we have either run out of stored produce or what is growing isn’t ready to harvest yet. Besides, we can’t grow things like citrus fruits, so we need to import those. And while everyone is distracted by UK (and USA) politics, climate change is running rampant and diddly-squat is being done about it.

I set up Organic Ilford as a way of helping to create local solutions to global problems. I decided to relaunch it to continue that goal.

Agriculture is the biggest global polluter. Which is pants given we need to eat. But what we eat and how it’s farmed can either has a positive or negative impact, to us and the planet. Your money has power and where you spend it empowers that thing. Buying a weekly veg bag from Organic Ilford supports a community-focused food chain that has a tangible impact on the local community, economy and environment.

By prioritising chemical-free growers and farmers as close to Redbridge as possible we can invest our hard-earned money in the local economy, paying farmers and workers a fair price, and not giving it to tax-dodging companies and shareholders. Ecological agriculture protects wild and edible biodiversity and works to protect nature, rather than actively degrade and destroy it. Reconnecting people with their food supply returns power to individuals, not corporations.

Knowing the name of the farmer that grew the food that now graces your plate is not some hipster fad; it means you are supporting a real person, keeping them in business, keeping a roof over their head, keeping the land safe from development and toxic chemicals. You know what is (or rather, what isn’t) in your food. You eat food that builds wellness, not illness. For you and the environment.

Our offer…

Collecting your weekly bag and not being able to pick and choose might seem inconvenient but it’s a lifestyle change that is easy to accommodate. We operate the way we do to keep overheads down in order to keep the scheme affordable.